The placenta, the key organ upon which the fetus is entirely dependent for all oxygen and nutrition, grows in a branching fashion analogous to the growth of a tree and its branches. The major villous types, their principal time periods of development during gestation, and their specific physiology have been well delineated in the research setting. But routine pathology slide review has poor reliability in distinguishing the major patterns of placental branching morphogenesis. As the evidence that lifelong health risks appear to be correlated with birthweight, the importance of placental growth and development as the principal non-genetic contributor to fetal growth has grown.
The placenta is the only fetal organ that can be dissected in a living child to yield information related to cell proliferation (a marker of tissue health), branching (reflecting gene transcription events) and cell death.
Placental vascular growth, essential to healthy fetal life, is too complex to be reliably estimated even by specialists. Indeed, pathologists often make unreliable diagnoses of histology features that are recognized to be associated with long term health risks.
A reliable and automated assessment tool performed on routine stained placental slides may help understand how intrauterine stressors modulate placental (and by extension fetal) well-being.
Thus, there exists the need for an automated, reliable, and inexpensive method of measurement of placental vascular growth through placental imaging and histology.